


if you love me

by ShevatheGun



Category: A Memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine
Genre: Dream Sex, F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Identity Issues, M/M, Missing Scene, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, briefly mentioned Mahit Dzmare/Three Seagrass feelings, i fucking love this book okay, pwp but actually it's a 2500 word drabble on freedom and identity in the face of colonialism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:07:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23672059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShevatheGun/pseuds/ShevatheGun
Summary: Mahit wakes as herself. But she dreams as Yskandr. And in their dreams, they're with the Emperor.
Relationships: Mahit Dzmare/Nineteen Adze, Yskandr Aghavn/Nineteen Adze/Six Direction
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30





	if you love me

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this fic in my head the second I finished the book, and could not rest until I'd actually written it down. So. Enjoy. Rated M because there's a lot of sex but nothing truly kinky. Also, this story contains spoilers through the end of the book, so finish that first.

The Emperor is inside him.

Red petals on the floor. Honey liquor on his tongue. A night that tastes like dew, a palace like a jewel cracked open to reveal its red heart, and he invited this - doesn’t need to remind himself, it is a truth that sings out from under his skin each time Six Direction touches him. Delicate hands, acrobatic fingers, aristocratic wrists uncalloused, untouched. Soft skin, hot - like the man swallowed the sun and now its rich golden ichor flows through him in place of blood. Yskandr’s hands cup the back of his neck when they kiss. He has entirely lost track of the rest of himself, unspooling, arching in pleasure.

The Emperor is inside him. His Brilliance, the Reigning Emperor of All Teixcalaan, Six Direction, is inside him. The empire, the City is inside him, and it feels like a man - it _looks_ like a man.

Six Direction’s mouth on his mouth, hot and direct as a command. Six Direction’s hands in his hands, gentle and soft. Six Direction’s skin on his skin, human and inhuman both at once. Six Direction inside him, a decree, a joining, an effortless, wonderful, horrible thing.

Himself and not himself. Even the crudest, most scintillating words on Yskandr’s tongue have too much meaning.

_Take me. Take me, take me, take me…_

“Yskandr.”

Six Direction breathes his name into his neck, and Yskandr feels summoned, electrified, as though he has had no true name until now. Six Direction kisses him, and Yskandr tastes molten gold warping his tongue, blistering his throat. He could swear his chest glows orange and pink from the inside out. He aches. He wants.

Six Direction rocks inside him. Cards a hand through his hair. Beckons him up by a hand on his shoulder and Yskandr goes willingly, arms sliding around Six Directions neck, nose pressed to his temple, body spread open in his lap. Six Direction runs his hand up Yskandr’s spine, and presses his palm flush between his shoulder blades.

“Be mine, Yskandr.”

He says it so gently. Even in his moments of greatest cruelty, he is gentle with Yskandr.

“Let me have you.”

Yskandr’s laugh is half anguish. He kisses him deeply, feels them run together like ink. _Isn’t this enough?_ he wants to say. But he knows Six Direction’s answer. The Emperor is inside him. The empire is inside him, hungry and unmerciful, inflicting pleasure upon him in terrifying waves, bludgeoning him with ecstasy, taunting him with warmth. Seducing him.

 _Let yourself be seduced_ , it says, with a man’s voice, and a man’s touch. _Belong to me_ , it says.

And Yskandr thinks, with a voice both his and not his,

_Never._

“Do not ask the impossible, my darling,” Yskandr breathes.

 _But he did ask_ , something inside him says - _over and over and over--_

* * *

Mahit wakes as herself. But she dreams as Yskandr.

 _What are you trying to accomplish?_ she asks, trying to drive the phantom sensation of his pleasure out of her limbs. For the sake of efficiency, the shower in her cabin on the imperial cruiser bound for Lsel runs on a timer, and the water comes out in a blistering hot torrent from circulating near the engines.

<The dreams are no more voluntary now than they were when I was alive,> Yskandr replies.

 _They’re your memories_ , Mahit retorts.

There’s a pause, a strange mental echo. <They are and they aren’t.>

Mahit frowns. When she turns off the shower, she’s blasted with hot air - water billows off her, her skin steaming. She sits naked on her bedroll and applies lotion to her joints and her hands to keep them properly moisturized.

They’ve been together on the _Gold Horizon’s Eternal Hope_ for almost a month, and in that time, Mahit has been incredibly sparing in what she’s sought to access of Yskandr’s memories. There’s been no lack of opportunity - for the most part, they’ve chosen to remain isolated from the ship’s crew. Yskandr’s grief intermingles with Mahit’s own, and makes them unwilling to seek Teixcalaani company, though theirs is sought often enough, usually out of curiosity, and only once (thus far) out of vaguest animosity.

No, she’s had time to search through Yskandr’s memories - to make a project of it, if she so chooses. But she’s elected not, and has instead anchored within her own, running through conversations over and over, as though she’s the one of them who’s died and must make her peace with her own last words.

<If anything, you’re as much to blame as I am,> Yskandr points out. <Your dreams are much less pleasant than mine.>

He isn’t wrong. But they aren’t just hers, she knows he knows that.

Just as Yskandr’s dreams no longer belong to only him, Mahit’s nightmares are no longer entirely her own.

Nothing is.

* * *

The Emperor is inside him.

Six Direction’s hand cups his face, and he arches helplessly into that touch, into the rhythm of his hips, skin slick with sweat and anointed in gold. Everywhere Six Direction touches him, he leaves liquid gold fingerprints, and they burn. Yskandr is dizzy with passion and heartache, with love and with wine.

_How can you love an emperor like you’d love a person, Yskandr?_

A tiger is lounging in the bed beside them, enormous and resplendent. She is watching them make love, watching Six Direction take him, her golden eyes on his. She is watching him gasp and jerk beneath Six Direction’s elegant fingers, watching Six Direction kiss him, watching them intermingle, sensuous and strange. Six Direction’s skin is so hot it hurts to touch.

* * *

He is sitting with the Emperor in a dining hall that overlooks the City, eating sugar flowers from Six Direction’s hands, laughing soft and low.

“This can’t still be entertaining for you. Surely, Your Brilliance, you’ve had these every day of your life.”

Six Direction tips his head, as though considering him. “Not every day.”

“I simply think I must bore you, occasionally, finding such novelty in what is, to you, mundane.”

“You do not bore me,” Six Direction says. “The things that so enthuse you are pleasurable to me by extension. I watch you enjoy yourself… and it pleases me.” His gaze is steady and unyielding, hypnotic. Oppressive.

“I watch you pleasure yourself. And this brings me great satisfaction.”

His hand is gentle on Yskandr’s cheek, and his skin burns with scintillating heat. He runs his hand along Yskandr’s jaw to his throat, and Yskandr shudders and moves to clear the way, unclasping the buttons of his shirt to bare the skin beneath. Six Direction slips his hand beneath the fabric and presses it to Yskandr’s heart, and for a moment all Yskandr can feel is the sacred rhythm of their pulse beating in time. His eyes flutter shut and he _aches_ for this. He feels Six Direction’s other hand on his cheek again, thumb pressed to his lips, forehead resting against his own. He turns his mouth to kiss his palm, cupping his hand in his own.

“It pleases me to please you,” Yskandr whispers.

“I know that it does,” Six Direction murmurs. “It is what makes you so beguiling.”

“Is it?”

Six Direction catches Yskandr’s hand in his, and turns his palm outward. The light of the red solar lamps pools in the curved well there, as Six Direction runs his thumb along the length of his scar.

“You’ve bled for me, Yskandr.”

“Yes, Your Brilliance.”

“Bleeding is no small thing for politicians. It isn’t called for in your line of work.”

Yskandr moves forward, until separation is a pretense between them. Six Direction’s other hand is a brand on his chest.

“I find politics to be far less about violence than it is about clever improvisation - and that hardly precludes the occasional blood oath, Your Brilliance.”

Six Direction pulls where Yskandr has pushed, and Yskandr goes willingly into his lap, sliding his arms over his shoulders and his thighs over Six Direction’s hips.

“You’ve bled for me,” Six Direction murmurs. “But you do not belong to me. You do not serve me.”

“No,” Yskandr whispers back. “No, my darling. I do not.”

“By your own choice?”

“Always.” He moves his head slowly, back and forth, letting their noses rub together as he does. “You have my loyalty, darling.”

“As much of it as I can have.”

“ _Nav_ ,” Yskandr says, and there is an ache in the dream - a reflexive pushing between him and Mahit; he did not wish to share this with her, this is memory, _his_ memory, his most precious moment. The name he should not have been permitted to say, the affection he should not have been permitted to feel. This he wants to be his and only his - but that is not the way of things.

“Nav,” he breathes, an intimacy permitted to him against all convention. “Isn’t it better-- isn’t it better to be chosen? Again, and again… Isn’t it better to be reached for than it is to be held?”

Six Direction’s arms tighten around him. “You like to be held.”

Yskandr hums and doesn’t disagree. _But not forever,_ he knows.

“You’re flighty, Yskandr. If you were a bird,” Six Direction whispers, “I would cage you here. You’d like that more than you think.”

“A bird with clipped wings feels only resentment for what it’s been rightly denied. Isn’t it better,” Yskandr says, hands dripping down Six Directions front to part layer after layer of silk. “Isn’t it better that each morning I alight on your window sill? My wings can carry me so far from you… but I always come back to land in your palm. To perch here…” His scarred palm presses flush to Six Direction’s chest, and it feels as though they’re breathing as one. “By my own choice?”

He presses his lips so tenderly to Six Direction’s that he thinks he may never speak again - they kiss molten and slow, and he sinks into it, thoughts getting lost in that wave of thick, heavy sweetness.

“You forsake my protection,” Six Direction says into his mouth. “Every time you fly from me.”

“But I do not forsake _you_ ,” Yskandr says back.

_Never - I can never…_

* * *

The Emperor is inside of her. The tiger’s teeth close on her neck.

Pain is an exclamation, her hands slick with blood. She is holding the tiger’s jaws open, but its breath is hot on her skin, and her wrists tremble with exertion. She can feel the Emperor inside of her, but she cannot see him past the tiger’s maw. She can only feel the heat of him, the shape of him. It feels as though she were someone else from the waist down, the pleasure of sex muted by the sloppy, chimeral nature of her body. The tiger’s teeth are bigger than her fingers.

“Belong to me,” says the tiger, in Nineteen Adze’s voice.

Hands move over her hips; the tiger’s breath smells like meat and flowers.

“Be mine, Mahit.”

* * *

Mahit spends much of the next day staring out of the viewport, trying not to look at her own reflection.

 _You’re not doing anything to help me avoid being seduced_ , she notes.

<I’d argue there’s not much I could do. But I think you’re doing fairly well at ‘being seduced’ all on your own.>

He’s right, of course. Long before they were ever paired, Mahit spent long hours of her childhood yearning for Teixcalaan as if it _were_ a person, a thing she could obtain and become a part of. Her heart aches for it still - to have and be had by it - as much as it does for Three Seagrass. She and Yskandr were selected for their compatibility. It only makes sense that she could be seduced as he had been.

<Ah - but I, too, did the seducing.>

As he’d been instructed to do, Mahit recalls. He had enticed, just as Darj Tarats had told him to. He had enticed, and seduced, and attracted. He had lured, and convinced, and soothed, and distracted.

But he’d enjoyed it. That wasn’t part of the instructions. No - that, more troublingly, was rooted in the place where he and Mahit overlap.

All actions that they take from here on out will be her own, of course. She’s capable of making her own choices. She can choose to resist, to ignore the want inside her.

<But you’re afraid.>

She is.

She’s afraid that, if pushed, she will not be able, as Yskandr was, to refuse. She thinks of it and feels a simmering dread.

Yskandr doesn’t answer her fear with his own.

<You’re stronger than you think,> he says. <But if you’d like practice… I suppose we can repurpose a few of my own memories.>

In sleep, Yskandr unfurls Nineteen Adze before her and says, <Go on. Practice.>

* * *

The Emperor is inside of her.

Nineteen Adze’s fingers are slick with oil that warms to the touch, and her hands leave behind liquid flames that lick Mahit’s skin from the inside. Where Six Directions hands are delicate, Nineteen Adze’s are precise, as unerring as her gaze - she thrusts her fingers inside her and Mahit can’t help the way her body twists, arching, bursting obediently with pleasure.

She aches to be kissed, and Nineteen Adze obliges her, laying her mouth over her breasts and collarbone, her stomach and her hips. She’s beckoning gently inside of Mahit with her finger, and she chuckles when Mahit jolts beneath her, petting over her flank with a strange patience.

But there is no desperate litany in Mahit’s head, no chanting voice, no _take me, have me, keep me…_

<Not yet,> Yskandr tells her.

Perhaps never, Mahit thinks, even as ecstasy bounds through her blood.

“Are you mine?” Nineteen Adze asks her.

Mahit releases a shuddering breath, and practices.

“No,” she says, with a Lsel smile. “No, Your Brilliance. I’m afraid not.”

_Not yet._


End file.
